Dunkirk Movie Reviews

Trending News: The Reviews Are In. Is Dunkirk The Best WW2 Movie Ever Made?

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The early reviews of Dunkirk are in. It might just be the best World War II movie ever made.

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It’s fair to say there’s a been a bit of hype surrounding Dunkirk. It’s perhaps mostly to do with Christopher Nolan, a director whose work is by now regarded as among the very best in cinema.

It also has to do with the film’s epic scope — literally, in terms of it being the widest 70mm release in 25 years — and a cast that includes Kenneth Brannagh, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy.

But Dunkirk also feels like a bit of a referendum on World War II stories. Do people really care anymore? Or, has too much time passed? Too many generations?

Well, later this week you can decide for yourself. Or maybe you want to let the critics decide for you, because the first reviews are in and it’s fair to say they’re giddyingly positive.

Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter calls the film an “impressionist masterpiece” and “a war film like few others, one that may employ a large and expensive canvas but that conveys the whole through isolated, brilliantly realized, often private moments more than via sheer spectacle, although that is here, too.”

Empire’s Nick De Semlyen observes that, despite Dunkirk’s scope, it’s Nolan’s second shortest film. “But discard any suspicions that may prompt about scaling down of ambition,” he says. “Effectively one enormous, stunningly rendered and thunderously intense set-piece stretched to feature-length, Dunkirk thrusts you into a pressure cooker and slams the lid on.”

Variety’s Peter Debruge compares it to some of the classic war pictures of Lee Marvin and John Wayne saying, “a master of the fantastic leaves his mark on historical events for the first time.”

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw reckons it is Nolan’s best film — a “part disaster movie, part compressed war epic, and all horribly appropriate for these Brexit times.” He continues: “A powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified with defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen.”

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich praises the film’s abstraction of the Germans, making them an almost existential threat. “Dunkirk is a bloodless but profoundly unnerving assault on the senses,” he says, “a spectacle that searches for order in the midst of chaos.”

One of the few reviews that qualifies its praise is Rogerebert.com’s Matt Zoller Seitz, who describes it as more of a disaster or survival picture than a war flick. “Dunkirk showcases the best and worst of the director's tendencies,” he says. Still: “The best win out and the worst recede in memory when you think back on the experience—provided that you want to remember Dunkirk, a movie that's supposed to be grueling and succeeds.”